‘My story is not an interesting one,” Michael K says but the Baxter Theatre, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus and Handspring Puppet Company have proved him wrong. In their multilayered production, using dance, film, music and exquisite puppetry, they stage a sweeping adaptation of JM Coetzee’s Booker prize-winning novel from 1983, which gives dignity to a humble man. Born with a cleft lip, institutionalised and treated with contempt throughout his life, Michael gets swept up in a dystopian civil war in South Africa as he attempts to bring his ailing mother back to her childhood home on a farm.
Mother and son are puppets, with their puppeteers visible on stage, animating them with fluid grace. At other times, Michael’s face is presented in closeup on film, walking through a majestic mountain landscape, in images strikingly juxtaposed with the live action scenes. Around the puppets, the ensemble cast of nine perform multiple roles and take turns to narrate the story of a man who initially seems defined by what he is not: not a hero, not powerful, someone who simply wants to be left alone but is hounded by both sides in this unspecified, brutal war.
In this adaptation and staging by Lara Foot, the war seems timeless and all too contemporary, with curfews, raids, labour camps, refugees and wanton destructiveness, as when a guerrilla group discover Michael on the farm and trash his watermill and crop. Later, when held in a camp, Michael wonders if there is anyone left in the world who is neither imprisoned nor guarding a prison.
While not always clear in its narrative shifts, and taking its time to unfold over almost two hours, the cumulative impact of all the artistry on stage is immense. As in their creations for War Horse, Handspring’s Adrian Kohler and Basil Jones succeed in finding the emotional essence of a story, with a precision that mirrors Coetzee’s chiselled prose. Bleak scenes are tempered by Michael’s discovery of his joy in cultivating his patch of ground, a “miracle” that helps him endure pitiless treatment. He was becoming “a different kind of man”; one who will be hard to forget.
At Black Box theatre, Galway, until 30 July. Then at Assembly Hall, Edinburgh, from 4-27 August.
